By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Up to 14 million families will be able to apply for up to £10,000 each to pay for energy-efficiency improvements on their properties, ministers will announce today. The money – which will be paid back in energy savings over 20 years – is almost double the previous figure of £6,500 outlined when the scheme was launched.
Under the proposal, which forms part of the Government's Energy Bill, homeowners and landlords will be able to apply for the money to pay for new boilers, insulation and central-heating systems.
Ministers claim it will be biggest home-improvement programme in Britain since the Second World War. It is the cornerstone of the Government's attempts to reduce household emissions by 30 per cent by 2020.
The work will be initially funded and carried out by Government-accredited providers and will be paid back through reduced-energy costs – while the bills paid by households will remain the same. The cost of repayments will stay with the property, rather than the individual.
The extra funding is designed to benefit larger and harder-to-insulate properties which would not have been eligible for funding before. The the Government is also expected to announce shortly that double glazing will be included in the energy-efficiency measures available. This is to address concerns that if all the energy savings provided by the scheme were "invisible", such as insulation, the take-up might be low.
Ministers believe that if they can offer visible home improvements the number of people applying for cash will increase significantly. "We want people to think of this as home improvements, and part of the idea of that is to make the changes visible," a Government source said. "While insulation is vital, we are also hoping to offer higher-profile improvements to people – which they can see with their own eyes."
The Energy Bill will create powers allowing any tenant asking for reasonable energy-efficiency improvements to receive them from 2015 onwards. It will also allow local councils to insist that landlords improve the worst-performing homes. There will be a £2bn central-government fund to pay for improvements in homes which are not eligible for the scheme because the cost of the improvements would outweigh the savings made.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said up to 100,000 jobs could be created by 2015 and that everyone doing the work would be trained properly. A similar scheme in Australia was scrapped earlier this year after it emerged that 160,000 homes were fitted with sub-standard insulation and 80,000 faced safety risks from the work.
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
How Angela Merkel became Germany's unlikely green energy champion
Yale Environment 360: Fukushima has seen German chancellor Angela Merkel embark on the world's most ambitious plan to power an industrial economy on renewable sources of energy
• Renewable energy can power the world, says IPCC
Christian Schwägerl for Yale Environment 360 guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011 14.15 BST
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is anything but a left-wing greenie. The party she leads, the Christian Democratic Union, is the political equivalent of the Republicans in the US. Her coalition government is decidedly pro-business. Often described as Europe's most powerful politician, Merkel's top priority is job creation and economic growth.
Yet if the chancellor succeeds with her new energy policy, she will become the first leader to transform an industrialized nation from nuclear and fossil fuel energy to renewable power.
In mid-March, Merkel stunned the German public and other governments by announcing an accelerated phasing out of all 17 German nuclear reactors as an immediate reaction to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. The chancellor now says she wants to slash the use of coal, speed up approvals for renewable energy investments, and reduce CO2 emissions drastically. That means that the 81 million Germans living between the North Sea and the Alps are supposed to cover their huge energy needs from wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass within a few decades. Indeed, by 2030 green electricity could be the dominant source of power for German factories and households.
"We want to end the use of nuclear energy and reach the age of renewable energy as fast as possible," Merkel said.
After the chancellor's surprising announcement, opposition parties from the left decried it as a political stunt, an act of opportunism, and even panic, ahead of key regional elections in Southern Germany. But after these elections were lost by her party, Merkel soldiered on. In the past weeks, government officials have already offered details of the "energy turn," as Merkel calls the change.
The numbers that circulate in Berlin's government district at the moment are staggering. Merkel's administration plans to shut down the nuclear reactors — which in recent years reliably provided up to a quarter of Germany's huge needs as baseload electricity — by 2022 at the latest. It wants to double the share of renewable energy to 35 percent of consumption in 2020, 50 percent in 2030, 65 percent in 2040, and more than 80 percent in 2050. At the same time, the chancellor vows to cut CO2 emissions (compared to 1990 levels) by 40 percent in 2020, by 55 percent in 2030, and by more than 80 percent in 2050.
That makes Germany the world's most important laboratory of "green growth." No other country belonging to the G20 club of economic powers has a comparable agenda. In the U.S., President Obama is expanding state-backed loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build more reactors, and Republicans are blocking measures to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is Europe's largest economy. Making such a country a renewable powerhouse would transform it into the undisputed mecca for everyone on the planet concerned with the environment and green-tech business.
But why would Merkel have Germany do what other big nations deem too risky and too expensive? Is she prepared to sacrifice Germany's economic viability, which stems from manufacturing and technology export to a great extent?
Clearly, Angela Merkel has reacted to the Fukushima disaster completely differently from Barack Obama and other world leaders. In the past, Merkel too has been pro-nuclear. She was convinced that nuclear power was safe and clean, and that the Chernobyl accident was a result of Soviet inefficiency, not of the technology itself. Only last year, she fought to extend the operation time of Germany's reactors by 12 years on average, against fierce opposition from the left and environmental groups.
In my view, the key to the chancellor's radical turnaround lies deep in her past. In the 1980s, well before she became a politician, Merkel worked in the former East Germany as a researcher in quantum chemistry, examining the probability of events in the subatomic domain. Her years of research instilled in her the conviction that she has a very good sense of how likely events are, not only in physics but also in politics. Opponents of nuclear energy were "bad at assessing risks," she told me in the 1990s.
Then came the March disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, which made the chancellor realize that she had been terribly wrong about the probability of a nuclear catastrophe in a highly advanced nation. Merkel's scientific sense of probability and rationality was shaken to the core. If this was possible, she reasoned, something similar might happen in Germany — not a tsunami, of course, but something equally unexpected. In her view, the field trial of nuclear energy had failed. As a self-described rationalist, she felt compelled to act.
"It's over," she told one of her advisers immediately after watching on TV as the roof of a Fukushima reactor blew off. "Fukushima has forever changed the way we define risk in Germany."
Merkel's conservative environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, recently echoed this line of thinking when he said that the Fukushima disaster "has swapped a mathematical definition of nuclear energy's residual risk with a terrible real-life experience." He added: "We can no longer put forward the argument of a tiny risk of ten to the power of minus seven, as we have seen that it can get real in a high-tech society like Japan."
The new course is a huge challenge in terms of cost and feasibility. Of the current 82 gigawatts of peak demand, about half comes from coal, 23 percent from nuclear, 10 percent from natural gas, and 17 percent from renewables. That means three quarters of Germany's electricity sources will have to be replaced by green technology within just a few decades, if the nuclear phase-out and the CO2 goals are to be accomplished.
Germany is in a good starting position, though. Since the 1990s, the Renewable Energy Sources Act has paved the way for billions of Euros flowing to consumers and investors for green power projects. The law guarantees that each kilowatt hour of green electricity is fed into the grid and bought at a favorable statutory rate by operators. The rate varies between green energy sources, but is considerably higher than normal electricity prices. It is guaranteed for a 20-year period. This makes investment in renewable energy projects very attractive; witness Google recently pumping money into a German solar park.
As a result, the share of renewable electricity in Germany has jumped from 5 percent in the 1990s to 17 percent today. Traveling through the country, it is easy to see signs of this change. In the north, wind farms are now characteristic of many regions, particularly along the coastlines of the North and Baltic seas. In the south, which is richer in sunlight, photovoltaic cells cover the roofs of whole villages. The bright yellow of rapeseed is prevalent in many regions, as the plant is widely used for producing biodiesel. More and more farms are equipped with big tanks holding "biomethane" derived from maize or agricultural residues.
Merkel's big hope for her "energy turn" is offshore wind energy. After a sluggish start, several new commercial projects are under construction. On May 2, Merkel proudly pressed a button at a ceremony on the Baltic Sea coast, setting in motion 21 huge offshore wind turbines 16 kilometers away at sea. Taken together, they can provide 50,000 households with renewable energy.
"Baltic 1" is Germany's first commercial offshore windpark. The turbines have been constructed by Siemens, a company that until recently earned most of its money in the energy sector by building nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants. The wind farm is run by EnBW, a German utility that has so far produced most of its electricity with nuclear power plants. Nothing could symbolize the new policy better than this offshore wind farm.
Merkel's big bet is that environmental technology will be one of Germany's most important sources of income. Already, the country's share in the green-tech world market is 16 percent, which means billions of Euros in business. Renewable energy has generated 300,000 'green collar' new jobs in the past decade, Röttgen says. Big companies like Siemens and Bosch are determined to become "green multinationals." Thousands of small- and medium-sized technology companies see green technology as an important part of their business and investment strategy.
Experts agree that the transition will be costly and carry economic risks. Already, consumers in Germany pay about 5 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour as a surcharge to finance the feed-in tariffs, which enable homeowners of wind turbines or geothermal installations to sell renewably generated electricity back to the grid at favorable rates. For an average family of four, this amounts to 220 U.S. dollars per year. And with investment needs in the hundreds of billions of Euros, consumers can expect a growing surcharge on their monthly bill. This will surely test Germans' willingness to support Merkel's plan.
But Röttgen, the environmental minister, points out that mass deployment of renewable energy technology will drive down costs. "When more people consume oil and coal, the price will go up, but when more people consume renewable energy, the price of it will go down", he says. Röttgen argues that instead of sending billions of Euros to Russia and other sources of imported energy, Germany will now be able "to give that money to our green-tech engineers and local craftsmen." Still, keeping the cost of the transition low and stopping energy-intensive companies from relocating to Romania or China will be very difficult.
In addition to the challenge of huge costs, a complete overhaul of the energy infrastructure is necessary. It is not enough to install wind turbines and solar panels. A new grid is needed, as are ways to store green electricity. As wind and sunshine are highly variable, electricity will increasingly flow intermittently. Power will have to flow from offshore wind farms in the north of the country over many hundred kilometers to the industrial centers in the west and the south.
Experts estimate that more than 4,000 kilometers of new "eco-electricity highways" are necessary to connect renewable power plants to consumers and avoid power outages. Storing green electricity when the wind is blowing strongly or when there is ample sunlight is an unsolved challenge.
But even if all technological problems are solved, it is not easy to roll them out nationwide. Many Germans don't like the sight of wind turbines, which are called "asparagus." New hydro plants and some wind power installations face fierce opposition. So do those "eco-electricity highways," which still look like ordinary power lines to their neighbors. Local residents have yet to be convinced that they have to sacrifice undisturbed horizons for the greater good.
To the surprise of many, supplying an industrial nation with renewable energy also raises environmental concerns. The construction of offshore wind parks has been found to harm the ears of the harbor porpoise, a small whale species that is protected by law in Europe. Toxicologists are worried about dangerous level of cadmium, a heavy metal, in photovoltaic cells that might poison firefighters and create disposal problems in the future. And environmentalists are worried that the expansion of cornfields will dry out peaty soils, leading to greenhouse gas emissions, and be harmful for biological diversity. Germany would also have to rely more on natural gas, a fossil fuel, in the intermediate term if nuclear power will be phased out.
Despite the many problems and pitfalls, the chancellor's new course is already attracting admiration from abroad. William Reilly, the former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said on a recent visit to Germany that he was impressed by Merkel's energy turn and the example it sets for the rest of the industrialized world. "It was breathtaking to see this huge change by a conservative government," he told me for a report in Der Spiegel magazine after meeting German politicians, NGOs, and business representatives.
The Japanese are certainly watching. While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan yesterday reiterated his support for nuclear power, officials in the Japanese embassy in Berlin already wonder aloud how their government will justify sticking with nuclear energy when a country like Germany is taking bold steps to thrive without.
• Renewable energy can power the world, says IPCC
Christian Schwägerl for Yale Environment 360 guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011 14.15 BST
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is anything but a left-wing greenie. The party she leads, the Christian Democratic Union, is the political equivalent of the Republicans in the US. Her coalition government is decidedly pro-business. Often described as Europe's most powerful politician, Merkel's top priority is job creation and economic growth.
Yet if the chancellor succeeds with her new energy policy, she will become the first leader to transform an industrialized nation from nuclear and fossil fuel energy to renewable power.
In mid-March, Merkel stunned the German public and other governments by announcing an accelerated phasing out of all 17 German nuclear reactors as an immediate reaction to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. The chancellor now says she wants to slash the use of coal, speed up approvals for renewable energy investments, and reduce CO2 emissions drastically. That means that the 81 million Germans living between the North Sea and the Alps are supposed to cover their huge energy needs from wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass within a few decades. Indeed, by 2030 green electricity could be the dominant source of power for German factories and households.
"We want to end the use of nuclear energy and reach the age of renewable energy as fast as possible," Merkel said.
After the chancellor's surprising announcement, opposition parties from the left decried it as a political stunt, an act of opportunism, and even panic, ahead of key regional elections in Southern Germany. But after these elections were lost by her party, Merkel soldiered on. In the past weeks, government officials have already offered details of the "energy turn," as Merkel calls the change.
The numbers that circulate in Berlin's government district at the moment are staggering. Merkel's administration plans to shut down the nuclear reactors — which in recent years reliably provided up to a quarter of Germany's huge needs as baseload electricity — by 2022 at the latest. It wants to double the share of renewable energy to 35 percent of consumption in 2020, 50 percent in 2030, 65 percent in 2040, and more than 80 percent in 2050. At the same time, the chancellor vows to cut CO2 emissions (compared to 1990 levels) by 40 percent in 2020, by 55 percent in 2030, and by more than 80 percent in 2050.
That makes Germany the world's most important laboratory of "green growth." No other country belonging to the G20 club of economic powers has a comparable agenda. In the U.S., President Obama is expanding state-backed loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build more reactors, and Republicans are blocking measures to reduce CO2 emissions. Germany is Europe's largest economy. Making such a country a renewable powerhouse would transform it into the undisputed mecca for everyone on the planet concerned with the environment and green-tech business.
But why would Merkel have Germany do what other big nations deem too risky and too expensive? Is she prepared to sacrifice Germany's economic viability, which stems from manufacturing and technology export to a great extent?
Clearly, Angela Merkel has reacted to the Fukushima disaster completely differently from Barack Obama and other world leaders. In the past, Merkel too has been pro-nuclear. She was convinced that nuclear power was safe and clean, and that the Chernobyl accident was a result of Soviet inefficiency, not of the technology itself. Only last year, she fought to extend the operation time of Germany's reactors by 12 years on average, against fierce opposition from the left and environmental groups.
In my view, the key to the chancellor's radical turnaround lies deep in her past. In the 1980s, well before she became a politician, Merkel worked in the former East Germany as a researcher in quantum chemistry, examining the probability of events in the subatomic domain. Her years of research instilled in her the conviction that she has a very good sense of how likely events are, not only in physics but also in politics. Opponents of nuclear energy were "bad at assessing risks," she told me in the 1990s.
Then came the March disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, which made the chancellor realize that she had been terribly wrong about the probability of a nuclear catastrophe in a highly advanced nation. Merkel's scientific sense of probability and rationality was shaken to the core. If this was possible, she reasoned, something similar might happen in Germany — not a tsunami, of course, but something equally unexpected. In her view, the field trial of nuclear energy had failed. As a self-described rationalist, she felt compelled to act.
"It's over," she told one of her advisers immediately after watching on TV as the roof of a Fukushima reactor blew off. "Fukushima has forever changed the way we define risk in Germany."
Merkel's conservative environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, recently echoed this line of thinking when he said that the Fukushima disaster "has swapped a mathematical definition of nuclear energy's residual risk with a terrible real-life experience." He added: "We can no longer put forward the argument of a tiny risk of ten to the power of minus seven, as we have seen that it can get real in a high-tech society like Japan."
The new course is a huge challenge in terms of cost and feasibility. Of the current 82 gigawatts of peak demand, about half comes from coal, 23 percent from nuclear, 10 percent from natural gas, and 17 percent from renewables. That means three quarters of Germany's electricity sources will have to be replaced by green technology within just a few decades, if the nuclear phase-out and the CO2 goals are to be accomplished.
Germany is in a good starting position, though. Since the 1990s, the Renewable Energy Sources Act has paved the way for billions of Euros flowing to consumers and investors for green power projects. The law guarantees that each kilowatt hour of green electricity is fed into the grid and bought at a favorable statutory rate by operators. The rate varies between green energy sources, but is considerably higher than normal electricity prices. It is guaranteed for a 20-year period. This makes investment in renewable energy projects very attractive; witness Google recently pumping money into a German solar park.
As a result, the share of renewable electricity in Germany has jumped from 5 percent in the 1990s to 17 percent today. Traveling through the country, it is easy to see signs of this change. In the north, wind farms are now characteristic of many regions, particularly along the coastlines of the North and Baltic seas. In the south, which is richer in sunlight, photovoltaic cells cover the roofs of whole villages. The bright yellow of rapeseed is prevalent in many regions, as the plant is widely used for producing biodiesel. More and more farms are equipped with big tanks holding "biomethane" derived from maize or agricultural residues.
Merkel's big hope for her "energy turn" is offshore wind energy. After a sluggish start, several new commercial projects are under construction. On May 2, Merkel proudly pressed a button at a ceremony on the Baltic Sea coast, setting in motion 21 huge offshore wind turbines 16 kilometers away at sea. Taken together, they can provide 50,000 households with renewable energy.
"Baltic 1" is Germany's first commercial offshore windpark. The turbines have been constructed by Siemens, a company that until recently earned most of its money in the energy sector by building nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants. The wind farm is run by EnBW, a German utility that has so far produced most of its electricity with nuclear power plants. Nothing could symbolize the new policy better than this offshore wind farm.
Merkel's big bet is that environmental technology will be one of Germany's most important sources of income. Already, the country's share in the green-tech world market is 16 percent, which means billions of Euros in business. Renewable energy has generated 300,000 'green collar' new jobs in the past decade, Röttgen says. Big companies like Siemens and Bosch are determined to become "green multinationals." Thousands of small- and medium-sized technology companies see green technology as an important part of their business and investment strategy.
Experts agree that the transition will be costly and carry economic risks. Already, consumers in Germany pay about 5 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour as a surcharge to finance the feed-in tariffs, which enable homeowners of wind turbines or geothermal installations to sell renewably generated electricity back to the grid at favorable rates. For an average family of four, this amounts to 220 U.S. dollars per year. And with investment needs in the hundreds of billions of Euros, consumers can expect a growing surcharge on their monthly bill. This will surely test Germans' willingness to support Merkel's plan.
But Röttgen, the environmental minister, points out that mass deployment of renewable energy technology will drive down costs. "When more people consume oil and coal, the price will go up, but when more people consume renewable energy, the price of it will go down", he says. Röttgen argues that instead of sending billions of Euros to Russia and other sources of imported energy, Germany will now be able "to give that money to our green-tech engineers and local craftsmen." Still, keeping the cost of the transition low and stopping energy-intensive companies from relocating to Romania or China will be very difficult.
In addition to the challenge of huge costs, a complete overhaul of the energy infrastructure is necessary. It is not enough to install wind turbines and solar panels. A new grid is needed, as are ways to store green electricity. As wind and sunshine are highly variable, electricity will increasingly flow intermittently. Power will have to flow from offshore wind farms in the north of the country over many hundred kilometers to the industrial centers in the west and the south.
Experts estimate that more than 4,000 kilometers of new "eco-electricity highways" are necessary to connect renewable power plants to consumers and avoid power outages. Storing green electricity when the wind is blowing strongly or when there is ample sunlight is an unsolved challenge.
But even if all technological problems are solved, it is not easy to roll them out nationwide. Many Germans don't like the sight of wind turbines, which are called "asparagus." New hydro plants and some wind power installations face fierce opposition. So do those "eco-electricity highways," which still look like ordinary power lines to their neighbors. Local residents have yet to be convinced that they have to sacrifice undisturbed horizons for the greater good.
To the surprise of many, supplying an industrial nation with renewable energy also raises environmental concerns. The construction of offshore wind parks has been found to harm the ears of the harbor porpoise, a small whale species that is protected by law in Europe. Toxicologists are worried about dangerous level of cadmium, a heavy metal, in photovoltaic cells that might poison firefighters and create disposal problems in the future. And environmentalists are worried that the expansion of cornfields will dry out peaty soils, leading to greenhouse gas emissions, and be harmful for biological diversity. Germany would also have to rely more on natural gas, a fossil fuel, in the intermediate term if nuclear power will be phased out.
Despite the many problems and pitfalls, the chancellor's new course is already attracting admiration from abroad. William Reilly, the former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said on a recent visit to Germany that he was impressed by Merkel's energy turn and the example it sets for the rest of the industrialized world. "It was breathtaking to see this huge change by a conservative government," he told me for a report in Der Spiegel magazine after meeting German politicians, NGOs, and business representatives.
The Japanese are certainly watching. While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan yesterday reiterated his support for nuclear power, officials in the Japanese embassy in Berlin already wonder aloud how their government will justify sticking with nuclear energy when a country like Germany is taking bold steps to thrive without.
For electric cars, it's about charging rather than subsidies
Britain should invest in a network of charge points to encourage the uptake of these vehicles
Anthony Thomson The Guardian, Tuesday 10 May 2011
The ongoing debate about electric cars, which typically focuses on their range, cost and practicality, is heating up again thanks to the news that, of an expected 8,600, only 534 people have signed up for the government's electric car subsidy. As you say: "The government's hoped-for electric car revolution ... is getting off to a slow start" (Electric car scheme lacks spark, 29 April).
Your article correctly points out that the cost of a typical electric car is offset by the fact that they "pay no vehicle excise duty, have cheaper insurance premiums, are exempt from London's congestion charge and can be charged for free at some public car parks".
It's the last part of this statement that needs a fanfare. You can indeed charge your electric car at locations beyond your front drive. Often frustratingly for the electric vehicle (EV) industry, the arguments about electric cars for domestic use rarely look at how owners can be supported with the right infrastructure.
Developments in charging technology have made it quicker and more efficient for drivers to charge both parked and moving cars. As a geographically small country, the UK has closely connected towns and cities and, as a result, relatively few charge points are needed to reach most of the population.
The range of an electric car can be significantly increased by providing quick "top-up" charging points. This is better for an electric car's battery too, as its lifespan is lengthened by regular top-ups, rather than deep cycling. As the battery contributes heavily towards the average EV's overall cost, protecting a buyer's investment is perhaps more crucial than paying part of the upfront purchase price.
The online comments underneath the original article clearly show that EV range is a big issue for potential buyers. Tackling this with what we call "opportunistic charging" – giving drivers the chance of quick boost charges during their journeys – is reassuring but also practical. With wireless charging, drivers don't even need to get out the car and plug in a cable, so a trip to the station to pick up a friend could include a 10-minute charge in the station's waiting bay.
In future, motorways lined with charging pads could create "e-ways", which allow EVs to pick up charge on the move. There is already an embryonic version of this in practice – in Italy some electric buses are charged at each stop in short bursts. From this to a wider infrastructure supporting domestic vehicles is possible. As the article points out, "there is likely to be a sales surge as more of the nine cars that qualify for the grant come on to the market in the coming months", yet this extra choice for consumers has not been translated into a rush for subsidies. No matter how good the model, without the infrastructure to support regular, practical use, drivers will fail to see how an electric car can be a seamless part of their daily lives.
But if the UK uses its natural advantages to best effect, its infrastructure – not subsidies alone – may be the answer industry and buyers alike need.
Anthony Thomson The Guardian, Tuesday 10 May 2011
The ongoing debate about electric cars, which typically focuses on their range, cost and practicality, is heating up again thanks to the news that, of an expected 8,600, only 534 people have signed up for the government's electric car subsidy. As you say: "The government's hoped-for electric car revolution ... is getting off to a slow start" (Electric car scheme lacks spark, 29 April).
Your article correctly points out that the cost of a typical electric car is offset by the fact that they "pay no vehicle excise duty, have cheaper insurance premiums, are exempt from London's congestion charge and can be charged for free at some public car parks".
It's the last part of this statement that needs a fanfare. You can indeed charge your electric car at locations beyond your front drive. Often frustratingly for the electric vehicle (EV) industry, the arguments about electric cars for domestic use rarely look at how owners can be supported with the right infrastructure.
Developments in charging technology have made it quicker and more efficient for drivers to charge both parked and moving cars. As a geographically small country, the UK has closely connected towns and cities and, as a result, relatively few charge points are needed to reach most of the population.
The range of an electric car can be significantly increased by providing quick "top-up" charging points. This is better for an electric car's battery too, as its lifespan is lengthened by regular top-ups, rather than deep cycling. As the battery contributes heavily towards the average EV's overall cost, protecting a buyer's investment is perhaps more crucial than paying part of the upfront purchase price.
The online comments underneath the original article clearly show that EV range is a big issue for potential buyers. Tackling this with what we call "opportunistic charging" – giving drivers the chance of quick boost charges during their journeys – is reassuring but also practical. With wireless charging, drivers don't even need to get out the car and plug in a cable, so a trip to the station to pick up a friend could include a 10-minute charge in the station's waiting bay.
In future, motorways lined with charging pads could create "e-ways", which allow EVs to pick up charge on the move. There is already an embryonic version of this in practice – in Italy some electric buses are charged at each stop in short bursts. From this to a wider infrastructure supporting domestic vehicles is possible. As the article points out, "there is likely to be a sales surge as more of the nine cars that qualify for the grant come on to the market in the coming months", yet this extra choice for consumers has not been translated into a rush for subsidies. No matter how good the model, without the infrastructure to support regular, practical use, drivers will fail to see how an electric car can be a seamless part of their daily lives.
But if the UK uses its natural advantages to best effect, its infrastructure – not subsidies alone – may be the answer industry and buyers alike need.
Renewable energy can power the world, says landmark IPCC study
UN's climate change science body says renewables supply, particularly solar power, can meet global demand
Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011 11.13 BST A solar power plant in the Mojave desert. Photograph: AP
Renewable energy could account for almost 80% of the world's energy supply within four decades - but only if governments pursue the policies needed to promote green power, according to a landmark report published on Monday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world's leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations, said that if the full range of renewable technologies were deployed, the world could keep greenhouse gas concentrations to less than 450 parts per million, the level scientists have predicted will be the limit of safety beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible.
Investing in renewables to the extent needed would cost only about 1% of global GDP annually, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC.
Renewable energy is already growing fast – of the 300 gigawatts of new electricity generation capacity added globally between 2008 and 2009, about 140GW came from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, according to the report.
The investment that will be needed to meet the greenhouse gas emissions targets demanded by scientists is likely to amount to about $5trn in the next decade, rising to $7trn from 2021 to 2030.
Ramon Pichs, co-chair of one of the key IPCC working groups, said: "The report shows that it is not the availability of [renewable] resources but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades. Developing countries have an important stake in the future – this is where most of the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity live yet also where some of the best conditions exist for renewable energy deployment."
Sven Teske, renewable energy director at Greenpeace International, and a lead author of the report, said: "This is an invitation to governments to initiate a radical overhaul of their policies and place renewable energy centre stage. On the run up to the next major climate conference, COP17 in South Africa in December, the onus is clearly on governments to step up to the mark."
He added: "The IPCC report shows overwhelming scientific evidence that renewable energy can also meet the growing demand of developing countries, where over 2 billion people lack access to basic energy services and can do so at a more cost-competitive and faster rate than conventional energy sources. Governments have to kick start the energy revolution by implementing renewable energy laws across the globe."
The 1,000-page Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) marks the first time the IPCC has examined low-carbon energy in depth, and the first interim report since the body's comprehensive 2007 review of the science of climate change.
Although the authors are optimistic about the future of renewable energy, they note that many forms of the technology are still more expensive than fossil fuels, and find that the production of renewable energy will have to increase by as much as 20 times in order to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. Renewables will play a greater role than either nuclear or carbon capture and storage by 2050, the scientists predict.
Investing in renewables can also help poor countries to develop, particularly where large numbers of people lack access to an electricity grid.
About 13% of the world's energy came from renewable sources in 2008, a proportion likely to have risen as countries have built up their capacity since then, with China leading the investment surge, particularly in wind energy. But by far the greatest source of renewable energy used globally at present is burning biomass (about 10% of the total global energy supply), which is problematic because it can cause deforestation, leads to deposits of soot that accelerate global warming, and cooking fires cause indoor air pollution that harms health.
There was disappointment for enthusiasts of marine energy, however, as the report found that wave and tidal power were "unlikely to significantly contribute to global energy supply before 2020". Wind power, by contrast, met about 2% of global electricity demand in 2009, and could increase to more than 20% by 2050.
As with all IPCC reports, the summary for policymakers – the synopsis of the report that will be presented to governments and is likely to impact renewable energy policy – had to be agreed line by line and word by word unanimously by all countries. This was done at Monday's meeting in Abu Dhabi. This makes the process lengthy, but means that afterwards no government or scientist represented can say that they disagree with the finished findings, which the IPCC sees as a key strength of its operations.
The launch of the report is streamed on the IPCC web site.
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